Biden Admin. Moves to Secure Abortion Access For Unaccompanied Migrant Youth

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Facts

  • Biden's administration on Thursday issued a directive instructing officials to avoid placing pregnant migrant children — or migrant minors who have suffered from sexual assault — within states that lack abortion access.1
  • The guidance, issued by the US Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), also instructed officials to transfer girls who are already being housed to states where abortion remains legal. The ORR is in charge of housing unaccompanied children who lack legal status in America.2
  • The ORR, a subsection of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), stated that unaccompanied children who are pregnant require an 'appropriate location' to support 'health care needs and access'.3
  • According to ORR data, approximately one-third of the 123K unaccompanied migrant children who were taken into US custody in the 2021 fiscal year were female. The organization has not published figures on how many of them were pregnant.4
  • During the Trump administration, the ORR prohibited staff from facilitating abortions without permission from the agency's director — a move that an appeals court decided in 2019 was unconstitutional. At least 20 states currently have full or partial abortion bans in place, following the decision by the US Supreme Court to overturn the federal right to abortion in June this year.5

Sources: 1CBS, 2New York Post, 3FOX News, 4Reuters and 5Saltwire.

Narratives

  • Left narrative, as provided by Los angeles times. Polls continuously show that the majority of Americans support abortion and disagree with the Supreme Court's decision to revoke the constitutional liberty. It is ludicrous that politicians are restricting women's bodily autonomy, and the midterms have further demonstrated that Americans want reproductive rights upheld.
  • Conservative narrative, as provided by Restoring america. Abortion is certain to remain legal in many states for the foreseeable future, therefore it is not enough simply to ban the procedure — pro-life supporters must develop efforts to help mothers get through unexpected pregnancies. By giving mothers-to-be more options than parenthood or facing abortionist's knife, US society will start moving away from its fixation on Roe v. Wade.

Predictions